‘Such Brave Girls’ Review: Kat Sadler’s Hulu Series Puts a Fresh Spin on British Trauma Comedy

Daniel Fienberg
·6 min read
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If the expectation for holiday season programming is treacle and sentiment, Hulu’s new comedy Such Brave Girls is like a scorpion in your stocking.

In a good way.

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Coming in just under the wire to cement creator-star Kat Sadler as one of the year’s breakthrough talents, Such Brave Girls is a hilarious slice of family dysfunction, focusing on a trio of women whose only connection is their trauma and, you know, shared DNA.

Especially in the first half of its six-episode run, it would be possible to reject Such Brave Girls as repetitively narcissistic, when the truth is that it’s more accurately a spin on a familiar type of British comedy, one populated by characters defined exclusively by their damage. It’s a genre in which the best examples are shows like Fleabag or Feel Good and the worst are lost to the cultural scrapheap.

Hopefully, thanks to Sadler’s scathing scripts — this could, if it’s successful, be the most quotably cruel show since Succession — and an ensemble awash in corrosive chemistry, Such Brave Girls should break through with viewers seeking an alternative to warm, fuzzy seasonal cheer.

Sadler plays Josie, an undermotivated 20something living in a small town near, but not too near, Manchester. Josie, who has been committed multiple times and had multiple suicide attempts, is working a bookshop job she hates (“Work isn’t about fulfillment. It’s about earning money so you can buy stuff that makes you feel fulfilled,” her mother tells her). She’s also dating a devoted young man (Freddie Meredith’s Seb) whom she hates, or at least whom doesn’t like in the same way, in part because Josie is gay or suspects she ought to be gay.

“Finding yourself is hard,” she says at one point. “That’s why I’ve been on this gap year for so long.”

Josie lives with her sister, Billie (Sadler’s real-life sister, Lizzie Davidson), who works as a wicked witch at a themed child play emporium and is deeply in love with Nicky (Sam Buchanan), a trashy guy whose idea of affection is using Billie as a human shield for a possible drug bust. Billie, like Josie, has daddy issues, presumably stemming from that time their father left to get teabags and never came back.

They both share a house with domineering mum Deb (Louise Brealey), whose idea of loving advice is, “I know it’s hard, but as you get older, you learn to love with less of your heart. Less and less until eventually there’s nothing left anymore.” Deb is currently focusing what’s left of her heart on Dev (Paul Bazely), a strange widower with a great house and… little else to recommend him other than the fact that apparently, he ejaculates very little and it doesn’t smell. Ew. Yes, indeed.

Josie, Billie and Deb are a tight and thoroughly co-dependent unit, with Billie and Deb bonded by their willingness to blame Josie for everything wrong with their lives and Josie bonded to the other two by her inability or refusal to go anywhere healthier.

Billie and Josie are convinced that they had the worst childhoods imaginable, a deficit of upbringing that explains all of their grown-up flaws. The truth, as the show generally understands and they never do, is that their situation is one of unremarkable and borderline clichéd discomfort, rather than distinctive awfulness. They’re poor, but getting by. Deb is a woeful mother, but in a familiar and conventional vein of demanding sitcom mothers, the type that female protagonists on shows like this so frequently have. Dad’s departure is a trope, as are the individual, flawed men they’ve welcomed into their lives to fill his void. In lieu of therapy — the inefficiencies of NHS mental healthcare are the series’ clear villain, if you know where to look — and healthy coping mechanisms, they’ve opted for excuses.

Now, if you think the show doesn’t get that these characters have defined their personalities based on an outsized appreciation of their own damage, you’ll probably find Such Brave Girls to be occasionally insufferable. The key is to believe that, from the sarcastic title on down, Sadler is playing with a British miserabilist comedy tradition that often forgets to find laughs or insights while wallowing in poverty porn. I like to think of Such Brave Girls as a far less specific and nuanced, but far funnier, complement to Cash Carraway’s HBO comedy Rain Dogs, another show looking askance at British kitchen sink realism.

The key feature of Such Brave Girls is that it very actively wants to make you laugh, and the insults and one-liners crackle with self-lacerating cleverness. Occasionally Sadler’s dialogue gives the impression of taking a biting stand-up routine and distributing punchlines across the three characters as they shred themselves, or just as frequently shred Josie, to bits. Initially, the opening up of the story is done more with bawdy gags involving sex and bodily fluids that maybe don’t land with quite the same regularity.

Fortunately, the punchlines are tight, and the puerile gags — a reasonable amount of vomit, pee and people wandering in on awkward intimate situations — are extreme enough to carry the show until the middle of the season, when Sadler and director Simon Bird begin to expand the range more successfully. A midseason episode set on a particularly dreary camping trip marks the beginning of the evolution of Such Brave Girls from precision solipsistic noodling into something more soulful.

As it’s refining its voice and storytelling opportunities, Such Brave Girls is driven by its lead performances. Sadler, who gives Josie’s search for identity and fulfillment the huge and hopeful eyes of a puppy yearning for adoption, adds just enough sweetness to her character’s comic brokenness and delusion.

She and Davidson have the natural rhythms of a duo who have been completing each other’s sentences for decades, and it’s a hoot watching Davidson become more and more comfortable with the zealot’s glint in Billie’s eyes. She’s looking for something to fill the gap left by a father figure, and whether it’s Nicky or God, she’s eroticized that need in a very amusing way.

Tying them together is Breasley, bringing meanness and meaning to lines like, “Remember, pregnancy is not a game. Getting pregnant with Josie was the worst mistake of my life and not just because it was with Josie.” She’s a nightmare mother, but her obliviousness — “I won’t have any eating disorders in this house,” she announces, ahead of the weekly family weigh-in — feels genuine, not malicious.

The three women share a comedic hive mind that Sadler understands well. Her most direct path to understanding the men is to accept that anybody who would want, or need, to insert themselves into the life of this family must be even more disturbed. Bazely and Meredith have a good time seeing how far they can push their characters’ eccentricities without Josie, Billie and Deb caring or noticing.

There are still lots of places for Such Brave Girls to grow, emotional gaps for it to fill in and realizations for it to force upon its unwilling characters. But for these six episodes, it works as an introduction to a lethally droll and riotously depressing family and a promising new comic voice in Kat Sadler.

Happy holidays and enjoy the venomous sting.

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